Anti-aging Steps To Minimizing Wrinkles

The most important thing is to take care of your skin before changes start to take place. The cause of lines around the mouth is typically a combination of sun exposure and years of movement. An estimated 80% of visible facial aging is due to chronic UV exposure.

Topical antiaging treatments are more effective for fine lines.To reduce the appearance of the fine mouth lines you already have, Dermatologist Dr. Neal Schultz, MD , recommended applying a daily moisturizer and hydrating products to the area to “puff up” the skin to help replace some of the volume lost from collagen damage. Next, use a product that stimulates collagen production to fill in those wrinkles, such as Retin-A, Retinol or AHA .

A sample skin care routine to erase those lines would look like this, according to Schultz: Use a moisturizer with peptides and SPF in the morning, and at night, use retinol or AHA followed by a vitamin C serum, which also plays a role in generating collagen, followed by a moisturizer.

For deep wrinkles, Schultz recommends a more invasive treatment: ablative lasers , which resurface the top layer of skin and stimulate collagen production, removing those deep grooves. Because it’s more invasive, there’s more downtime while your skin heals, but Schultz noted that only one to two treatments are needed to get results. Or you can opt for less invasive non-ablative lasers, which only destroy 20 percent of the outer layer of skin and trigger skin-smoothing collagen production. The less invasive treatment has less downtime, but can require multiple sessions.

Dermabrasion and Microdermabrasion can also reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles.

With dermabrasion, you'll get shots of numbing medicine to anesthetize the area to be treated. The doctor will use a high-speed instrument with an abrasive wheel or brush to remove the outer layers of your skin and improve any irregularities in your skin's surface.

With microdermabrasion, tiny crystals or a diamond tip instrument gently remove the outer layer of your skin. Microdermabrasion treatments are painless and multiple sessions are required to reactivate collagen production, smoothing out the lines over time.